Follow this and additional works at: Part of the Sociology Commons

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1 Bucknell University Bucknell Digital Commons Northern Ireland Archive Carl Milofsky Bucknell University, Follow this and additional works at: Part of the Sociology Commons Recommended Citation Milofsky, Carl, "" (2008). Northern Ireland Archive This Book is brought to you for free and open access by Bucknell Digital Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in Northern Ireland Archive by an authorized administrator of Bucknell Digital Commons. For more information, please contact

2 Page :00 Milofsky seeks permission to videotape, Bryan gives permission. Bryan is an anthropologist and is research partner with Neil Jarmin. 2:10 Bryan starts talking. Will look at the nature of space in Northern Ireland and particularly in Belfast, the history of the reasons those space relations exist, and how spatial relations relate to power relations. As an anthropologist he did not start with an interest in Northern Ireland but rather had an interest in ritual. That led him to an interest in the Orange Order, which no one else was interested in in the early 1990s. 3:20 But then around a number of issues arose about the rights Orange Order to parade and particularly through certain areas like Down and also there was an issue near here because on the last Saturday of every two and there was struggle over the right to use space and that s because they use space as an expression of their identity. As you spend more time in Northern Ireland things should get more confusing because the political troubles are related to identities but the identities are complex and there is no single source of identity. 4:30 Catholics and Protestants are people with a whole range of identities, one of which is that they might be Protestant or Catholic. But if you ask people if they are Protestant and they tell you they are, what do they mean by that? Not Catholic that s one definition, not Catholic. Do you mean that if they re Protestants that they re Loyalists? Then it has nothing to do with religion. (This part of the tape is a discussion with students so it s hard to hear; interacting with students he works out that they have come up with three definitions of Protestant.) So when you talk about Protestants it ranges from people who think religion is the most important thing to people who think it isn t important and they may or may not be related to Loyalism or Unionism. All of this is said in the way of introducing his talk.

3 Page 2 5:55 I m interested in how identities are developed through the negotiation, the construction, and understandings related to physical space. You ve been on tours, seen murals, and seen all of the memorials, and people have their particular reasons for building these memorials. It should be obvious to you by now that one of the ways that protests take place is through the negotiation of physical space. Who controls space? What does that space mean? 6:40 Let me give you three or four or five ways that you can think about space. Firstly, arrangements about space have to do with power. Who has the ability in this society to build war memorials? Symbolic space in the cities was marked by Unionism. Civic space in this society is mostly defined by Unionism, Britishness, and Loyalism because they were in positions of power. 7:35 However, power is much more multifaceted than to say there is a state that is dominant and people lower down who are controlled. Even in the 1930s and 1940s and 1950s there were Republican memorials to 1916 in West Belfast or a Catholic village somewhere and you d think the police would make this illegal because they shouldn t be allowing the Republicans to demonstrate. However, the police also thought that if we go disrupt that, we go and break up that demonstration there are going to be riots and you want to keep order. So at some point these demonstrations are going to take place. So the power, even when the state is very dominant in parts of Northern Ireland they are limiting their response. 8:45 The point you get to in the early 1980s when the Republicans decide to paint their murals putting their story on walls, the Republican story on the walls, the Provisional story on the walls, it tells you that they control this space around the city that they otherwise wouldn t have been able to control. So power is important. Memory is important. What people remember about places and spaces around them and how is it relocated? There are murals commemorating

4 Page 3 about half the murders that took places. People remember some of them and they don t remember others. 9:45 You see commemorations of people from paramilitaries who were killed but nobody remembers the 9 year old boy who was killed on Bloody Friday---does anybody know what Bloody Friday was? This is a good example of how memory is lost. You know what Bloody Sunday was but what was Bloody Friday? (Questions and guesses from the audience.) No it was in 1972 when the IRA set off 19 bombs in the city giving less than 22 minutes warning. 130 people were injured; 13 or 14 were killed. 10;50 So what do they remember about Bloody Friday? They remember, or they believe, that Gerry Adams was in charge of it. Now you don t see any memorials around that because there s no valuing of it. Among the Protestants there isn t any memory of the little boy who saw people hurt and went to their cars to help them and he was killed but there s no memorial to that? There is no memorial. 11:30 Now, I m not making a judgment on that but I m laying out ideas about who is remembered or what is remembered or where it s remembered. Now there are people around who remember that. There may not be a memorial but they remember that. So just as, who remembers women who were dying in munitions factories in the First World War who died because of a bomb vs. men who died on the front lines. People who are remembered have to do with their relationships to power. 12:12 The same is true in this society so that when you ve been seeing all of these things and people talking about these memorials, watching people relate to them marching around notice that other groups recognize and honor memorials in their own way just as the soldiers have done.

5 Page 4 12:40 I m going to show how some of these processes change and I m going to use the phrase policing, and when I use the phrase policing I m not necessarily talking about the uniform or include that. Policing takes place on a very broad level. When I wanted in years past to go to the city I knew it was a broadly Protestant, Unionist part of the city. I would call a particular taxi firm to pick me up because I knew that other taxis would have trouble in that part of the city. By doing that I was making my own decision about how I wanted to help police the city by where I m going in the city and whether I m going into a Catholic store or a Protestant store or whether I m going to take this bus even though it doesn t exactly go where I want to because it will go through a Catholic area or a Protestant one. 13:45 So in people s heads they police the city all the time. Community we have notions of community. People will tell you about the Shankill or the Falls area or this community center belongs to this group or that group, all of these are bounded. People buy in and they ll say this street and this street and this street are our community and that street over there is not our community. And sometimes there s a wall running right down between so there s a strong definition that controls what is our community. And in order for people to be excluded from these communities because of the way they sound, where they come from, the way they dress, and the way young people grew up to say that these are boundaries. 14:40 They come to identify areas in terms of inside boundaries and then when people march into their areas they are paralyzed (there s muddled speech here). 15:05 So the policing of areas pattern you ve got that as a way communities are divided. Then you ve got police who are defining which area is a problem, which is a very loaded area. Then you ve got the political moves of the paramilitary groups who also do that same sort of thing. Then you ve got government policy. It s government policy to put walls up.

6 Page 5 15:35 Now the larger question for the program a housing executive you go to a housing executive and say, I need a house and he says, Well I have this opening or that and by the way are you Protestant or are you Catholic? because that will have to do with where they give you housing. That all has to do with policing. We set up a division by the policing of public housing. 16:00 So right from my decision about which house to take and how you set your housing up or your education, we police this society and we police divisions in the society. 16:15 Now, the rules of places and spaces are things you can write down: shopping centers, the center of town, certain pubs, going to a rock gig or anything like that there are spaces, interesting spaces, where those divisions break down and that s intriguing. What s intriguing is that if you went in to see an Oasis gig, you d be banned. Why would you be banned? The organizers want to neutralize this space and to neutralize it you can t have anything that has an indication on it. A lot of the pubs in the center town wouldn t be happy with your going in there wearing that shirt (indicating a student). A lot of the pubs around here would be OK with your coming in there. 17:00 The decision you have, when you make that decision, deciding about whether to wear a Celtic (soccer team in Glasgow supported by Belfast Catholics) shirt or a Ranger shirt (Glasgow team supported by Protestants). When people make that decision they re making a decision about their shirt, they know they re making a decision that has more meaning than that. When you walk into the center of town wearing that shirt, it says things to a whole bunch of people who are looking at them. So whatever you have in mind when you wear a shirt like that it has meaning for all kinds of people who will be around you. What s interesting is that this means you have control. It doesn t matter what YOU want to put on. If you interact with the kids in town you won t be able to change what the implication or how right or wrong

7 Page 6 it is. What that action is telling is what all of that management of space is about. 18:00 And the last thing, which I ll talk about at the end, is integration and division. Do you create.it seems to me that in this context there are two ways you can manage it. (what follows is paraphrased since exact language is unclear) You can either try to manage the division, and in a way that s what we ve done with the? project. We ve stuck murals on walls, we ve created clear communities and made rules about them, and designated people as Catholic or Protestant, and we ve shared everything up. 19:00 Alternatively, of course, you can try to integrate. You can try to write things down. You can try to mix. This is a different thing to do. It is a different kind of policy. That would mean Catholics can go to any site they want with Protestants. Otherwise the only way you can go there is by accepting these rules. You could think up policies that are different and that going forward is where we want to go. That s an overview of what I have to say about how sites are managed in this society. So with that, we will go into some background about how this situation has come out. 20:00 The first thing is that we have a conflict that has been worked out through space. The Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s. It was about the fact that Catholics had been discriminated against in terms of housing, votes, jobs and that they were discriminated against. Maybe now you could argue about whether discrimination took place or you could argue about the levels or what the background was. It has always been hard to figure out the details of these things. What s interesting is that people were discriminated against in terms of the use of private space. In other words, very simply, if you had a nationalist background, (can t quite get this.something about how if you tried to get public housing you d have a rough time. Then he says something about the U.S. Marines patrolling some space, maybe not in Northern Ireland can t get it.)

8 Page 7 21:20 The Civil Rights Movement questioned the right to control public space. They wanted to march into the center of Cookstown Armagh, they wanted to march into Central Derry, and they wanted to march into the center of Belfast, although the Civil Rights Movement hardly took place in Belfast but that s another story. That disrupted a status quo that existed over how space was understood. It brought into the flow a whole different set of questions of what rights various people had in the towns and cities they live in. The response from people of people from working class backgrounds was one where we fear where this is going to lead, therefore we exclude Catholics and deny them access to our area. So you had what we now call ethnic cleansing. As the pace of that ethnic cleansing burst in and house burnings started---right down the road from here in places like Bombay Street---you also got the development of these vigilante groups that were going to protect their areas. Here we already had one that was organized and that was called the IRA. You also had the Ulster Volunteer Force, which was a Protestant-based organization that has a history that goes back to 1912 that was taken when they were reorganized in :02 And then you have the U.D.A. in 1972 to protect their own area. The state had lost control of defining the space. Or at least the Unionist state the Northern Irish Unionist state had lost control both to armed Republicans first to civil rights marchers, then to the Republicans, then to the Loyalists who saw themselves as Unionists without the trust of society to do their business. What is interesting is that in the 1970s that became a violent conflict and then when we came to care about conflict in 1995, we turned back to conflicts over disputes over the rights to control space. (He gives some unintelligible aside that seems irrelevant to the point he is making). What is interesting is that once the violence stopped, issues over civil space who controlled the public space arise again in the mid-1990s. And the issues now are how you manage people with different identities within public spaces.

9 Page 8 24:30 So, we ended up with a divided city. (He puts on a new PowerPoint slide that shows Belfast neighborhoods color coded in in terms of the percent Catholic where the checkerboard pattern of different sectarian neighborhoods is clear and the extreme segregation of many neighborhoods is shown.) You ve probably seen this picture already (he says), where the dominant Protestant areas are red and the dominant Catholic areas are green. We live just on the edge here (can t quite tell where.west of the Falls neighborhood). Even the yellow areas which are supposedly neutral (he points to a yellow area in East Belfast) even that area is violent. Actually all of the Protestants live at that end and the Catholics live at the other end, so even that area is violent. So you might have this with that division of public space. 25:05 That s come about through legal and illegal control of space. The second Northern Ireland was set up in 1921, almost immediately they passed emergency legislation to protect the sites. We call it emergency legislation, you call it Patriot Act or something like that. When the state passes legislation like that it allows you to do things. The state knows its citizens don t like them doing it but it is a lawful way of doing it. The emergency legislation, therefore, would stop a Republican parade because it threatens the state, even though at that point the Republicans could hardly threaten the union. Government emergency legislation, if you followed what theoretically could and could not take place in public space, it was supposed to be used when the state was on the verge of collapsing, but in effect it was used in day-to-day policing, and in fact the Terrorism Act in the rest of Britain was being used to arrest protesters, protesting arms escalation in London and this sort of legislation set up this kind of control of protesters. And that s what the state organizers did a lot of the time. 26:30 In the 50 and 60s they set up specific legislation to control parades and flags so it could become illegal to display a flag if it could be seen as a stimulus to public disorder and needless to say the Union Jack was never a seen as a cause of public disorder but the tricolor was seen as a cause of public disorder. Meanwhile you had

10 Page 9 symbols of Unionism like Orange Order parades or Apprentice Boys parades their parades were legal because they were symbols of tradition. Usually people can celebrate their traditions because they had the power to do so. So the reason you have a parading tradition that is dominated by Union loyalism is that they had the power to parade anywhere. 27:25 It used to be in Derry, you tend to think in positive ways about the walls, but it used to be that there was a St. Patrick s Day parade (this presumably would be a Catholic parade) around the walls of Derry. Now there isn t because that was stopped by the Apprentice Boys n the early part of the 20 th Century (the Apprentice Boys are a powerful Protestant fraternal society that celebrates the Siege of Derry and holds the walls sacred as a Protestant sectarian symbol, not to be polluted by Catholics). They wanted to march themselves later. 27:45 So the way the space gets defined by those who have little power and obviously you sometimes deal with drunkenness and working class Protestants who behave badly and the state does not particularly like that so sometimes the state would control some of the rowdiness and noise associated with Protestantism but basically those symbols, that identity dominates the space that you re in. 28:20 And actually, once the Civil Rights Movement starts to happen, effectively your ability to control that space declined, the police could no longer do it, so what do you do? You introduce the British Army to attempt to do it and that s when the control of space got into big trouble because you had to bring in soldiers to control those territories you are fundamentally losing control of what is taking place. (Looking at a slide) That s the barrier set up on William Street in Derry in 1969 and in many parts of Northern Ireland they used walls. And then, of course, you have no go areas (showing a slide of the Free Derry wall) and you ve visited all of these.

11 Page 10 29:00 How does the state act when it attempts to reform the police, and disarm the police, actually, in 1970 and got rid of the B-Specials who were a part time armed wing of the police full of Orange who the Catholics couldn t be the British state got rid of that because it was too discriminating in how it worked. But, of course, when they got rid of that Protestants got more and more scared and the UDA (Ulster Defense Association paramilitary) and in a way the community and the paramilitaries coming out of the local community organizations replaced the official state s control of policing and the B Specials. You got development of those paramilitaries and you got attempts at internment. The state goes around and tries to retake space. In 1972 the British state had 22,000 soldiers in Northern Ireland and that s three times as many as they had in the whole of the south of Iraq during the war. 30:10 That s a phenomenal amount of the British army trying to keep control of this space in the early 1970s. It s probably the equivalent of the push what is it you ve been doing in Iraq to try to control everything. And you discover that when the push is finished you probably haven t gotten very far.as the Brits found out here. And into Bloody Sunday (looking at slides) and I mentioned Bloody Friday. Then you ve got attempts by the paramilitaries to control the areas and Operation Motorman on the 31 st of July 1972 that used 22,000 soldiers to attempt to attempt to go to areas, all these areas around us, arrest Republicans, retaking areas, retake control of the state because where the civil rights marchers were demanding rights within the state, effectively the IRA was taking the state out of areas. 31;10 We were getting into that sort of warfare that went over the next two decades. (Shows a picture) That s the wall that s just down the road from here (the talk is happening in Belfast). So how is the state going to act? The state has lost control of some of the residential areas. What it does try to retain control of is the central business area (showing a slide of Belfast where the red business area is surrounded by yellow areas controlled by Catholics). We had security barriers all around here and when you went into the business area, if you went in

12 Page 11 on a bus they d come and search your bags. They were trying to create a safe area like the Green Zone in Baghdad where car bombs were destroying the economic fabric in that area. 32:05 The economic fabric of Belfast, of course, pretty much collapsed when the shipyards collapsed in the 1950s and 1960s and just a little segue to how conflict was taking place, if you get any urban area or anywhere that you have a lot of unemployed and unskilled young men, you ve got a policing problem. That goes for L.A. or?? city in Australia or anywhere you like. And in the 1950s and the 1960s we had that in Belfast Protestant and Catholic. And, of course, that fed into the status of being part paramilitary. 32:50 An element of that, just as it appeared in sort of "Gangland" activities in the US, here of course it appeared in a much more overtly political form of people joining paramilitaries. *changes slide* Alright. You have a marching season, a predominantly Unionist control of public space. And slowly an attempt to police the conflict by the British states, lets think about what that was. There was a realization by the mid 1970s that sending loads of soldiers to police this was pretty hopeless because most young British soldiers didn't really know what the conflict was about. They could barely tell who was who. And so that, for example, policing an Orange Parade, an Orange Parade is Protestant, Unionist and pro-estate? to most English and Scottish soldiers, particularly English soldiers, it was as odd as any other Irish tradition might be. Most English people aren't really going to know what an Orange Parade was all about. And when those soldiers were saying, "Well now that Orange Parade is going to come down that spot in the road and its a Catholic area so you're going to have to go and protect it. And by the way when you go into that Catholic area mind you that the IRA might shoot you." Now you can see that if you're one of these soldiers you might be saying, "Well now why in the hell do we have to take this parade through? Why not just take the parade somewhere else?" Of course the Orange Parade is saying

13 Page 12 then, "No we have the right to parade wherever we want. We are British, we are loyal subjects of the queen. And we can go on that street if we want and the Southport? bridge." And you're saying, "What in the bloody hell are we asked to do this for?" You see that for many English soldiers it wouldn't have made a great deal of sense at all. 34:55 And so there's a realization and it was to the advantage of the British state to create localized policing. And just a little segway, obviously one of the huge mistakes they made in Iraq, obvious mistakes was to dismantle the local army and the police force. I mean they know that that was a mistake now because you had such a vacuum there. Despite the fact that the local army and police were from the "wrong ethnic group" as far as America and Britain were concerned. Taking away all of that they controlled clearly left a vacuum that was filled in all sorts of ways all over the country pretty much except the fact that that was a bad mistake. And so you then have a policing situation where they start to think about how they are going to police what they are doing. And it came to an issue in the mid 1980s actually around a parade, you can see the map here *gestures toward the image on the projector screen* the yellow line being in Porter Dam? a very Orange area and town in Armagh. This here is the Catholic area near Galavachy Road? and remember I'm saying 1985, we are focusing on 1995 so this is a good 10 years before if we remember. A route they took through this Catholic area on Oakland street eventually the police decided we are not going to police that anymore. We are going to stop this Orange parade going through this Catholic area. 36:30 Now you've got to put that into the picture of what I've told you. From 1921 Oranges and Unionism went where it wanted and the police, who were often Orangemen themselves, made sure it went where it wanted to. Now it was suddenly 1985 and the police are deciding, "No we are not going to police that. It's not going to go through that Catholic neighborhood." Something's happened a *** of relationships has suddenly changed how space is being managed and in 1993 a similar sort of thing happened. Sinn Fein all of the sudden

14 Page 13 was allowed to hold demonstrations in the center of Belfast. Now this is the year before the IRA ceasefire and you've got to imagine that in the 200 years of Belfast being a big city, it had never had a Nationalist or Republican parade in the center of the city. Just try to imagine the police, in the way it used to be organized, made the decision about whether you had the right to parade or not. So all of the sudden you're a police officer in Belfast, you get your application through from the prisoners, Republican prisoners rights group saying they want to have a parade right down into the center of Belfast right up to the front of City Hall. And a middle ranking RUC officer says, "I'll tell you what, I like the letter, I'll say yes this time!" Now I don't believe that happened. Obviously there was work going on behind the scenes and I suspect that Sinn Fein being allowed to have a demonstration like that in 1993 was something never talked about. I suspect strongly that it was one of the signs they took of changes taking place. 38:20 All of the sudden we are now in the center of the city, so we march down the center of the city, there's the statue of Queen Victoria and city hall we are with our lads and we put our tricolor flag in one of Queen Victoria's hands and Gerry Adams? has made his speech in front of city hall. It happens on a weekly basis now. But in 1993 that was quite dramatic, from a Unionist and Protestant point of view these bastards has been trying to blow of the city for the past years. And now we are letting them march straight into the center of our city! It was a dramatic so... What you get is a dramatic change in the way that people began to understand the space that they are living in, or working in, or moving in. I think this is absolutely important, I'll give you another example, in 1976 the dispute over the parades really started to pick up. That is Catholic resident's groups saying we don't Orange Parades or Apprentice Boy parades coming through our areas. And the resident's group in Derry decided to hold a demonstration which started on the Waterside, a predominantly Protestant area of the city, came across the bridge and into the center of the city following the exact same routes as the civil rights marched did in 1969 on the occasion that sort of sparked the conflict. When you see pictures of police officers stopping the civil rights marches and

15 Page 14 one of the policemen sort of punches one of the marchers all hell breaks loose and the civil rights marchers have the crap beaten out of them. 40:10 So we are going to follow exactly the same route and the resident's group followed that route. And police blocked off the whole route from Loyalists protesters as they went onward into the city. That was quite interesting because a resident's group member a Republican and he made this speech that said, "Nothing has changed in this city since the civil rights marches in 1969." And I'm thinking, "Well hold on. In 1969 you were all blocked from parading and the police beat the crap out of you. In 1996, the police are up there in all their land rovers stopping the Loyalists protesters from coming down and you've been allowed to stop in the middle of the city and hold a speech in the center of the city! Absolutely everything has changed in the city of Derry!" Now, I've gone a little far, not everything has changed. Not everything has changed. Significant changes have taken place, people are understanding and using the space they are living in very different ways. Now, that created in the 1990s severe public order difficulties because Unionists/Protestants felt like they were losing because, in a way, they were. 41:30 Someone had given them the right to hold parades and by 1995 they were allowed, so this part parades through the blocks in 1985 (gestures to map on screen) and in 1995, I was there it was all quite exciting and very horrible, this part, the return parade was blocked by police. And I can tell you, this is another interesting little segway of how this works, protesters had always formed in the Catholic area along here and they sat on the road and the parade started from back by the church and it went down the road and as it got there the police smacked a few Protestant protesters on the head and pulled them off the road so that the parade could go on. On that Sunday, the police commander who was Ronald Flannigan? decided to stop the Orangemen at the church, leaving the protestors, and I know because I interviewed them after, sitting around thinking, "What's gonna happen? What are the police trying. They are trying something.

16 Page 15 What's going on, where's the parade?" And indeed I know, and this beats all the conspiracy theories, those protesters knew they were going to be beaten off the road. They didn't know or they hadn't thought about the sort of changes that had been taking place. And I'll tell you who was even more surprised the Orangemen. The leader of the Orangemen said, "We are not leaving here until we are allowed down the road." And this if you think about it, you can see all of the crowds coming up *points at screen* this is that picture there is from here *gestures to map indicating where the picture was taken*. And you can see all of the police on land rovers all of the protestors building up. I won't go into the full story of John Creed? eventually moved by the media they were allowed down by In 1996 there was a 5 day siege which took 3 days to resolve. 43:30 In 1996 there was a 3 day siege with Orange Parades all over the city. And I wasn't here during the hunger strikes, but after the hunger strikes in 1996 was probably the most violent the streets have ever been due to public disorder. The Orangemen were eventually allowed down in 1996 as well alright? But new legislation was brought in by the state, a parades commission was brought in and by 1998 they were banned from that route and while they are still protesting up that way, they haven't marched it since. 44:00 What that indicative of was a change in the way the state was managing the space people were living in. As I was saying you have the Parades Commission introduced and so the Orange Order now no longer control the spaces in every way they did. They still have 2000 parades and the Nationalists have about 250, I'm not saying that they've all of the sudden given up, but in certain areas they don't control space the way they used to. You'll notice that there has been certain police reform taking place which wasn't what the Republicans wanted, they wanted a complete reformation of policing, but and I will say, be careful not to date "reform" from before 1998 from the Agreements. A lot was taking place before then. If it wasn't taking place before then, how do you explain then that in that the police started blocking Orange parades? How do you explain that in

17 Page and in 1996 that the police started blocking other Orange parades? Alright. You explain it because there's actually a process of change taking place and that s what the Agreement became is sort of an encapsulation of that. Let me throw in another element to that which I think is important. 45:30 Before I go back to the space stuff, this is a much bigger argument to make. You can read books about the Peace Process being John Hume talking to Jerry Adams? in the late 1990s to secret discussions between the British government and Jerry Adams and Sinn Fein in the 1990s. If you read some versions, it was Sinn Fein's Peace Process and they pushed for peace. If you read other versions it was a heroic British government talking to the Irish government or an Albert Reynolds and ***? in the Irish government or it was the intervention of the Americans... You can read that in the political science books. What you don't read which I think is just as important, is the social and economic changes that create the background for that. Put very very bluntly, Catholics were in a totally different position in the 1990s than they had been in the 1960s. No the whole way, there was still poverty, but fundamentally most were not discriminated against. They were part of the state of NI. It might not have been the state they wanted, they might have still wanted a United Ireland, but they were citizens within the state of Northern Ireland. We have had equality legislation since the early 1980s, it didn't change things overnight, but by the 1990s you had more Catholics in civil service, more in universities which had its own discriminatory processes for keeping out Catholics in its time, now was changing. Catholics were the majority of students at Queens University, the majority of students at University of Ulster were Catholics. Things were changing. The houses just up above Queens, it used to be a chapel there and the chapel was there because the houses were owned by the wealthy Protestants who had Catholic servants who needed a chapel to go to, that's now a huge bloody Catholic church. Because many of those big houses are now owned by Catholics.

18 Page 17 47:45 What are we seeing within Unionism and Protestantism? They would be the big landowners, they would have owned all of the factories, if you looked out here you'll see a few of the remaining red brick chimneys and you'll see a shipyard, Protestant and Unionist owned. Where have all of those people and businesses gone? You still have some Protestant business owners, but the businesses in this city are now owned by big multinational companies, a large Norwegian company now owns the shipyard or what's' left of it, a Canadian company owns the Aerospace?. Our biggest employers become big international companies. Do you know what? They are not that interested in just employing Protestants. That whole economic fabric in Unionism which underpins Northern Ireland from 1921 up until the 50s and 60s and 70s has collapsed. The collapse of the Ulster Unionist Party is in part due to the people who ran it are not there anymore. So you can look at the Peace Process in terms of people negotiating, you can do all you like there, but don't forget that this society had also gone through some fundamental changes. The circumstances in which negotiations were taking place in 1996, 1997 or 1996 had been fundamentally different than what had been going on the n 1960s or indeed when we tried negotiations in the early 1970s, or indeed when we tried negotiations in the early 1990s. 49:30 So when you read the books going through it, politicians just don't do it by magic. South Africa didn't suddenly have a peace process because the promise of we are going to let ***? (person's name?) out and we are going to make this change. You know instinctively you should know that there's much more going on to it than that. So the agreement was a combination of fundamental change. When we do surveys now, Catholics actually favor, they are happier in Northern Ireland than Protestants are. You've got some real changes that underpinned what this agreement was all about. So let's see what the present and the future might hold and then I'll go to questions. 50:15 Now let me go back to the stuff that interests me, this symbolic demarcation of space. The top as you are looking at the top left hand

19 Page 18 (indicating the slide on the slideshow which has pictures on it). The picture is of a village in a county outside Laom? and that in the middle of the green you've got a Union flag and you've got a UVA flag. Just down the road is another village, the top right corner, that's another village. The bottom left that's a republican memorial in West Belfast. The bottom right is actually a memorial event for Barbara Sands? up in Belgrade?. *changes slide* You've got that same picture again. You've got demarcation using flags all the time during the summer in Northern Ireland. My research job is that I go and count, myself and 5 students go and count, all the flags on every lamppost in Northern Ireland 3 times a year, which sounds like a mad job because it is. But, its about looking at how space is being demarcated over time, where are the paramilitary flags? Let me give you a small example: new housing space opens down the road, a sort of Nationalist area, most Republicans put flags up and take them down a week later {as a response of rage}?. Just to show that this housing is their estate they left up a couple of Celtic flags. Well wouldn't you be, we just had it where those new houses are going up they "forgot" to take down those Celtic flags, you know what that probably means, that no bloody Protestants are going to buy those houses. And you know what that probably means? That Sinn Fein will probably get another county in the area once that population has moved in. That's the sort of stuff that goes on. Now I have to say from the flags, Unionists do it many more times than Catholics, but that's one small example of how you flag an area and make sure you keep it within a particular space, just some examples up there (meaning on the screen). 52:27 You've got, that's the start to the 11th Night? up on the lower Shankill and that s interesting, that picture, that area there if you go to the lower Shankill now you'll see its all walled up because they're rebuilding it. There's an attempt to rebuild that area and the bonfire on the 11th Night that you have is being, the way they normally have the bonfire, they can't have it anymore so I don't know what's going to happen. If you look at graffiti on the side of the wall that s going up,

20 Page 19 there's graffiti saying, "We want our area back." And you're gonna build, you know, middle class residentials there and I don't think its going to become a middle class residential area actually. But there's a battle in the Lower Shankill in the nature of space in that very spot. 53:20 *changes slide* So what's been the policy outworking of this? You've got a clear postconflict situation, how can you tell that, well apart from the huge reduction in organized violence, things like the memorials going up, issues over truth commissions and victims have become the key issues that people are talking about. As a part of that and beyond that, you've got issues of cultural identity. How are our identities, our conflicting identities being able to be expressed in the modern Northern Ireland, in the modern, liberal democracy? How are you to do that? Now a couple of words that have immediately been used around policy, one is parity of esteem and that's a phrase that Republicans have used quite a lot and in the end is probably coming back to bite them. That's basically our culture has the same esteem as your culture. Actually when you start to examine it, its a sort of really ridiculous argument of how you sort of value cultures against each other. It doesn't hold any real mortar at all when you try to do it, but its politically very important and you can see why. Republicans and nationalists were treated like second class citizens of Northern Ireland whereas Protestants and Unionists had their estates all over the place. Parity of esteem was saying that we deserve the same esteem as you do. What it produces of course, when you put it into policy, is some very odd things. Such as the fact that the Ulster Scots language groups demand that they should have exactly the funding as the Irish language groups since you've got parity of esteem now. Even though of course almost no one speaks Ulster Scots and there's quite a lot of Irish language speakers, the idea of parity of esteem is that we all have equal worth and therefore we all have equal funding. And even though, and if the St Patrick's Day in Belfast is funded as it is now since 1998 we have an organized St. Patrick's Day in the city, if that's funded then you should be organizing funding for the 11th Night Bonfires. Now to be blunt about it, St. Patrick s day you might love it or

21 Page 20 you might hate them, but let's face it, they're pretty meaningless events for most people they are just a chance to go out and get pissed and wherever you go around the world getting drunk seems to be the essence of St. Patrick s Day and I really can't come across any other argument that says otherwise when you see what takes place. But, its pretty unthreatening and its actually a day that Protestants and Catholics recognize, so we've turned it into a civic event in Belfast where Protestants and Catholics take part in it. But both sides however, remember when I showed you that picture of highly sectarian, very aggressive, very unpleasant for anyone who is not in that local plan??? 56:50 However, people in those areas are claiming parity of esteem. If St. Patrick s Day gets funded we should get funded. Now for me there's no equality between the events at all but there's that idea that we have to balance them. Now an alternative way of looking at relationships is the Good Relations argument. That is that what we need to deal with is relationships between people, we need to break down some of these barriers that exist. And what's the foundation that you could have for that, well here's one, basically the people in NI share the same culture. Fundamentally most of what they have is exactly the same. If you look at their broad Christian values, the democratic values, values around the law, marriage and divorce, abortion, all of these things you go down the line these are not two different cultures. Its a key to understand ethnic politics they have a very common culture but the define themselves as two very different by picking out the areas of differences within that broad cultural sphere. And what good relations might do is it might say well actually you have more in common than you have different and try to work on that and say why don't you try to do things together. So you might hold a St. Patrick s day in the city where our Protestants elements and our Catholic elements are treated together, we come and do things together. So that sense of sharing is kind of different from the parity of esteem. And what you will see might, in the moment, be the parity of esteem argument winning, basically within the local government now they count up how much one area gets and how much another area

22 Page 21 gets and as long as they are both being treated equally that will sort of solve the problem. 58:45 So that, so you've also got a contention between diversity and commonality, do we play on the diversities between our people's or on the commonalities. And in doing that, how would you therefore create shared space? Now the Belfast Agreement had these words in it in terms of symbols and emblems, (the slide behind him has this written on it)" All participants acknowledge the sensitivity of the use of symbols and emblems for public purposes and the need in particular in creating new institutions to ensure that such symbols and emblems are used in a manner which promotes mutual respect rather than division. Arrangements will be made to monitor this issue and consider what action might be required." It just occurred to me as I read that that it was going to be on the monitor *laughs*. So there's a way that these things are problematic am I right? So they came up with this shared future policy and this is all very noble if you read the stuff to it and you can all get this online if you're interested in these documents. (He keeps reading from a slide now)"to establish over time, a shared society defined by a culture of tolerance and a normal civic society..." Question mark, what's a normal civic society? "In which all individuals are considered as equals where differences are resolved through dialogue in the public sphere and all individuals are treated impartially. A society where there is equity, perspective for diversity and recognition of our independence." Now put simply what you read in that in 2005, now think back to the civil rights marches in 1968 and We are in a very different place in trying to organize our society in a very different way. The problems in some senses remain the same. In some cities the problems are even worse because the divisions in our society have been marked by the violence of 13 years. And the divisions in 30 years. But, that if you like is a description of what the civil space in contemporary Northern Ireland is going to be about. And that I suggest to you is very different from the civic space of NI in the 1960s, dominated as it was by Organism and Unionism.

23 Page 22 1:01:00 So one of the elements of summing up that shared future, of how the issues we have to deal with in this contemporary NI in Belfast, well, we've been talking about policing and I suggested to you that its policing in so many ways. ITs not only reform of the PSNI and demilitarization of paramilitaries and that still a big problem, you can't have proper democratic space when you have people who wield power through guns. Let me give you, you will know that, I've already explained to you how, the power of the Protestants and Unionists dominated the public sphere, but let me give you another example. The IRA had gotten into this area, if you hold a Public meeting to decide something about the area, everybody in that public meeting knows that the IRA in that area would have particular interests. So as somebody who is known to be Republican gets up and makes an announcement, it immediately becomes very difficult for anybody else to come back and contradict that. And in the micro politics in communities that s happening all the time. I'll give you another example, down in the... ***After that half sentence the tape keeps popping in and out then suddenly and abruptly ends. I assume the rest of the lecture and the Q&A section, which typically follows were not recorded***